'Lost' vote data in Miami-Dade just misplaced

Miami-Dade officials found backups of election data they assumed were lost, but the incident thrust Florida's woes back into the national spotlight.

BY JOE MOZINGO

jmozingo@herald.com

 

Miami-Dade election officials said Friday that they found electronic records of recent elections that were thought to be lost in computer crashes, but the explanation did little to ease the swirl of controversy that again put the county's voting process under scrutiny.

''While the world was supposed to be focused on Boston and the Democratic Convention, Miami-Dade County was making news,'' Commission Chairwoman Barbara Carey-Shuler told Elections Supervisor Constance Kaplan in the commission chambers.

''We do not intend to be the laughingstock of the world in this election,'' Carey-Shuler said.

With rare vitriol, Commissioner Betty Ferguson railed at Kaplan for not having revealed problems with the county's touch-screen voting machines until reformers and the media learned of them.

''It appears as if you hide information from everybody,'' she said.

''We are not trying to hide anything,'' Kaplan responded to the four commissioners present, blaming a recent spate of mix-ups on human error.

The records at issue: audits produced by the machines that provide a record of every vote cast and serve as the only reliable backup to check the accuracy of electronic vote counting.

''It is the vital record that makes certain that the election was correct,'' said Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, chairwoman of the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition.

The controversy began July 1, when the Reform Coalition made a public-records request for audits of a September 2002 primary. The group wanted to examine how the touch-screen machines functioned.

Two weeks later, they received a troubling response. An e-mail from an election department official said: ``The system crashed in May 2003 and again November 2003. As a result we lost most of the data files for the September Primary 2002.''

Others had sought the information, also to no avail.

In a lawsuit filed by a losing candidate for Hialeah City Council, attorney Richard Gross issued a subpoena to Kaplan in April, asking for the audits and final result tapes of the Nov. 4 election. The county attorney responded that the elections department had only the result tapes.

''The Elections Department does not have any of the other records in the subpoena,'' the county attorney wrote.

Yet until the coalition found about the potential loss, the issue did not make a stir.

When the news broke Wednesday, a team of state election officials and employees from the system's manufacturer, Election Systems & Software, arrived at election headquarters.

They found the audits on a computer, and Kaplan's secretary discovered a CD with information in a filing cabinet, the supervisor said.

Apparently, the department had been backing up the audit information all along as county auditors had recommended to prepare for server crashes.

Kaplan said crashes last year were caused not by technical failure, but by employees moving furniture without shutting the servers down.

Friday's discovery did little to assuage the fears of reformers worried about the Aug. 31 primary in a state made infamous by voting flaws in the 2000 presidential election.

Rodriguez-Taseff told commissioners the county not only needs to keep the audits, but to evaluate them.

The elections department does not regularly do that, and when an information-technology employee briefly took the task on himself last year, he found a significant glitch.

''Not only have we not looked at the audit data, we can't even find it,'' Rodriguez-Taseff said.

The coalition is particularly interested in a discovery by the American Civil Liberties Union that 1,544 people signed in at predominantly black precincts during the 2002 primary but never cast a vote.

'If the department cares about the accuracy of elections, it would have taken the audit data . . . and say, `How did we lose those votes?' '' Rodriguez-Taseff said.

''That is something we could do,'' Kaplan said. Asked later why the department had not done so yet, after two years with the machines, she said: ``We're not required to do it.''

Commissioners seemed less concerned with the specific points than with Kaplan's assurance that she had confidence in the system.

''Every vote will count,'' Kaplan said.

Commissioner Jimmy Morales, who is campaigning for mayor, said the voters he meets have strong doubts.

''I hear people saying they are going to vote absentee because they don't have faith in these machines,'' Morales said.

Ferguson was the most critical. ``It's almost a flip of the coin if we're going to get through this election without a problem.''